SpotCrime - The Public's Crime Map

In this post, I’d like to talk about the limitations of public crime maps and quasi-public-proprietary crime maps.   Don’t get me wrong, we at SpotCrime are fans of crime maps .  They are an effective tool to represent crime data and get information to the public.  But, crime maps are just one of many options of delivering useful crime data to the public. Maps in general will always have some type of dimensional limitations.  No matter how you adjust the parameters of time and distance with data on a map, it will still be just an incremental snapshot of the data set.   With crime data, if you take a too small snapshot and an area can appear to have no crime.  Take a too large of a snapshot and amount of crime data could crowd the map, show too much crime, and render the map unreadable.  Heat maps are sometimes employed to show density of data on a map, but these too have their own adjustable variances that can influence what is being projected.    Ultimately, the same limitations of a

SpotCrime just sent over 1 million crime alerts this week. A new record for us. That's over 140,000 alerts a day. We'd like to thank our subscribers and our supporters for helping us reach this number. By maintaining our integrity through our financial independence, SpotCrime strives to be the best at delivering timely information to the public through any and all available channels. We'd like to thank every police department that shares data with us and/or makes the data fully public without restrictions or without proprietary systems. Crime mapping is a useful tool to show crime information, but it pales in comparison to full transparency allowing the public and the press to consume, share, and publish crime data without the threat of a lawsuit. We at SpotCrime are proud of not charging any police department for our service, not billing the public for access and not taking any state or federal funds. And yet, in five short years we've become the most visited

At SpotCrime, we often request data from police departments that have purchased crime mapping systems.  Ostensibly, these crime maps displayed on the Internet are intended to distribute crime information to the public, but at this current time, almost every vendor that is contracted to map crime puts restrictions on access.  When we inform the police department that there are restrictions on access, about 50% of the time we find out that the department was not aware their vendor had restrictions preventing the press from republishing data.  A good majority of the time, we are able to access the data directly from the records system. The other 50% of departments abdicate responsibility to the vendor as if they are not responsible for the vendor they have contracted with to deliver public information.  Forgive the pun, but this is a cop out.  If you are contracting with a company to deliver public information to the public, shouldn't you be responsible for the vendor that puts restr

Lately, there has been a lot of talk about who owns public crime data .  SpotCrime was even pursued after another company in Federal court over the issue .  There are many entities that are staking claim and proprietary ownership over crime data. Here at SpotCrime, we believe that if ownership is to be claimed then crime data belongs to the individual who produces the crime. Credit should be given where credit is due -- and we believe the originator of the crime should be able to claim copyright over the crimes they have committed.   SpotCrime will compensate a criminal when a crime report is created and used on our website.  SpotCrime will give a penny ($.01) for every crime report created by an individual. To be properly compensated, please follow the directions below: Head to your local police department Report to an officer each crime you have committed.  If you think a crime can qualify as more than one crime (for example, not only did you steal the car, but when driving a